Yes yes, I am a Heat fan. But I have an honest question: does anybody really think the Spurs bench is a stone's throw away from being able to compete with the Heat on a nightly basis? Human nature factored heavily into this match up. There's no way our "big 3" were going to get pumped up playing the Spurs' bench players like they would against a team like the Lakers. Shaq acknowledged this during half-time about how he would have a huge drop off in performance playing against centers like Eric Montross.

I guess I'd just like everyone to cool their jets and please stop thinking the Spurs' bench would test the Heat in a 7 game series.

Did you have the beer and soda on ice? The sandwiches made? The pizza ordered? Your favorite chair smack in front of the big screen TV?
To watch Matt Bonner, Gary Neal, Patty Mills and Nando de Colo battle the defending champion Heat?

Ditto. He can dominate the ball a bit if you let him (partially a result of being the best scoring player on his team by a mile all the way up until he went pro) but he has really exceeded my expectations for him in the pros.

agreed, it was great to see basketball (along with mills) getting coverage when the olympics was on, though channel 9 didn't really do it justice! I loved waking up at 6 in the morning to catch team USA v Australia. My whole friendship group looks up to him.

Did you have the beer and soda on ice? The sandwiches made? The pizza ordered? Your favorite chair smack in front of the big screen TV? To watch Shaun Livingston, Jan Vesely, Jordan Crawford and Kevin Seraphin battle the defending champion Heat?

Stern's anger isn't over the perceived level of play, it's about marketing the league's star players and the games they play against one another. If Stern had to choose between tonight's game (Heat barely winning without the Spurs' stars) and a blowout game in which all the big stars played, he'd definitely choose the latter. Give Stern all the shit you want, but he knows that most people wanted to see Duncan/Ginobili/Parker play against Bosh/Wade/James.

I think this is the real heart of the argument. If Pop decided early on I'm not playing my starters on this game there is much less of a problem. Look at the promos, the articles written, how many bars would have filled up with patrons etc etc based on the fact that this was a star studded matchup, one of Miami's first real tests since winning the championship (with the spurs being so close to the finals last year).

A lot of Spurs fans speculated this for a while but Pop never announced it (maybe because Stern would take action if he announced it early).

However, the mere fact Pop played his bench who performed quite well (I actually thought they didn't play as well as they normally do) has given far more excitement and stuff to talk about than if they just played as normal, even with a close game between the two teams.

Stern has a valid point. As commissioner, his responsibility is solely to the nba and growing the game to potential viewers. His job is to popularise the sport in other countries who only know ginobili, parker, lebron, wade and etc. Spurs not pulling out their big guns might have been a huge let down for casual fanbase who don't understand and don't care for the deeper intricacies of the regular season.

But that is such a cop out. If he wanted to popularize the sport, why is he going to let the Kings move to Virginia Beach? Why did he let Isiah Thomas wreck the neck? Why does he let Dolan remain an owner? so on and so forth. There is a ton of suspect shit that goes on in the league that he has turned a blind eye to. So much suspect shit that has turned a lot of fans off from the game. Taking a stand over this, of all things, indicates bullshit. He's just mad that Pop has brass balls and does not give a shit about sticking it to Stern.

I'm pretty sure I made an unpopular comment in another subreddit and a couple of those people decided to karma stalk me. I noticed I suddenly had a cascade of downvotes for what are typically relatively benign comments far down in threads.

I hadn't thought about it that way, but its a huge fuck you to the rest of the spurs team. Also, teams have large rosters and routinely decide who to play when and for how long stern should not dictate team management.

Decisions like this is the difference between a good and a great coach. You lose nothing by resting your guys here outside of some butthurt fans/commissioner you potentially can correct mistakes of good rotational players by letting them play against a high caliber team.

I'll tell you what, I don't think there is a single butthurt fan in Spurs Nation. Our bench played tremendously and I speak on behalf of Spurs fans everywhere to say that we are pretty dang proud of what they accomplished last night. Although I strongly believe they should have come out with the win there is no reason to be mad at them for a loss either.

While Stern's motivations are suspect, I do have sympathy for fans who purchased tickets to this game in advance -- especially those that flew here from other countries. Still, in the end we all got to see an entertaining game.

I am sure Spoelstra loved having Stern motivate the Spurs like that BEFORE THE GAME!

Maybe IF it had turned out a 40-pt blowout with Miami resting their starters the second half, but lead changes down to the final minute with loose-nothing-to-lose backups nailing clutch 3s instead? Please. Pop is a better coach than Stern. Leave him alone.

It's easy to say this in hindsight. Most were disappointed when they heard Pop was sitting starters, and If I was going to the game I sure as hell would have been. This game turned out to be great, but it easily could have been a blow out. And I still would have rather seen how this game turned out if Duncan, Parker and Ginobli were on the court. These are two of the best teams in the league and we rarely get to see them play. I want to see them play. So yeah, fuck me too, I'm with Stern.

So what's the value of starters then? Why pay them huge contracts if it doesn't really matter if they play or not? People watch professional sports to see the best one team can throw at another. They buy tickets to see the great players go at it against great players. Sure, any game can be a blowout, But one scenario is much more likely than the other, and one carries more value than the other, and one is more interesting to watch than the other. Yeah, this was cool to see a bench squad step up game and bring it to the wire vs the defending champs. I won't deny that. But that's after the fact. Before the game I was annoyed, and I sure as hell don't want to see this become a trend. If rest is that big of a problem, then they should shorten the season.

I don't know if you can say that a blowout is unlikely in the regular season - last night's games had a lot of blowouts including the Pistons by 40 and the Bulls by 23 against teams with roughly equal records.

As for your starters question - did Houston fans expect Jeremy Lin with his contract to ride the pine for the 4th quarter in close games? Did Celtics fans want their team to give Rondo a contract to start shit and get suspended for 2 games? Contracts and being a starter mean nothing by themselves.

And honestly, if you're a Heat fan and follow the NBA in some capacity over the last few years, did you really expect the Spurs to play their guys in this situation? This move was hardly a surprise by Popovich, contrary to what headlines make it sound like.

The Spurs are a rare team that can be very competitive just by running their system and executing their gameplan; the personnel are nearly interchangeable. Basically, I would never write off a Popovich-coached team, no matter who is playing.

It's hilarious that Stern is shaming the Spurs for the good of the game. Where was he when Dwight Howard was raking Orlando over the coals? When the Bobcats became legitimately the worst team in the NBA? When every contending team sits their stars out at the end of each season?

That's why I love Pops. There had to be a deliberate challenge with the timing here: "What, is it weird that I happen to be doing this thing that is generally acceptable at certain times of the year during your primetime Thursday feature?"

not old in age, but he does have a lot of miles put in already. He has had some sprained ankles before, but I wouldnt call him injury-prone...it just gets down to the point of if Timmy and Manu are sitting, we are probably going to lose, so why bother having Tony play?

I know, and theres a pretty good chance that SA wouldve won yesterday if just Tony Parker played.

But just saying that in this scenario, LeBron wouldve/shouldve been benched for the same reason Parker was. It was just a game that Pop didnt really care about, at least not anymore than the other 81 games in the season.

This is why I don't get why if you're a FA in the prime of your career looking to win a championship you look for an organisation and a coach, rather than just other players, to team up with and win one.

Oh well..maybe San Antonio in 20 years will have that heritage that Boston and LA have today.

Finding the elite players in the NBA takes priority in my opinion. This game was actually a pretty good microcosm to illustrate what really separates your average bench player from the best players in the league. A team of professional caliber NBA players can hang with the best teams in the league but when it's crunch time there is nobody you can rely on to make a big play when you need it. San Antonio has been great in the last decade-plus but the system cannot make up for the elite skills of Parker, Duncan and Ginobili. On a basic level you need at least one of those guys to be able to close out games with reasonable consistency. If the other team has more of those guys then you will have a harder time keeping up, particularly when everything gets much tighter in the playoffs. While a player should certainly take a coach into consideration, if I am considering a franchise's legacy as a player then it is because I am trusting that a given organization will follow up on their history of landing other elite players of this nature (much like the Lakers). But even that can only help so much in comparison to the franchises that are one piece short right now and could turn out a championship contender with the right guy coming into town.

Spoelstra's a sports nerd, part of the new gaurd. Coaching used to be about charisma and boldness. None of that is important to Spo. He's a numbers guy who rates players and gives them minutes based on performance evaluations (kind of similar to points in NBA2k).

The reason why Spo has given Joel Anthony so many minutes in the last few years is because he consistently leads the team in making the correct play. He boxes out when he's supposed to, he double teams when he's supposed to, and he gets lots of rebounds.

That was a great game, the Spurs always find talent, and Pop always coaches the hell out of them. If it werent for Lebron going into beast mode at the end, SA wins that one. Don't ever count a Pop coached team out.

I swear, if Stern punishes Pop or the Spurs organization for this, he is so in the wrong. Not only is Pop preserving the long-term value of the Spurs franchise by taking it easy on his star players (and it's really only occasionally he does something this extreme), but he's also giving the deep rotation some breathing room, which is something nobody does and could potentially pay some high dividends.

He knows his bench is good and hungry for minutes, but it's not their place to ask for playing time. And it's happened time and time again, from Finley to Roger Mason Jr, if you step out of line and think you're more than you are he'll get rid of you. So time to time, he rewards them and gives them a stage to show what they're made of.

Some announcer/analyst on TNT mentioned the possibility of a suspension of Pop for a couple games as the likely punishment. That'd mean no Pop for the Grizzlies, the game we RESTED OUR STARTERS tonight to play them in the first place.

I didn't even realize what was going on when I first turned it on. I checked the score and flipped back to what I was watching. When I found out what Pop had done, I turned it on and left it on, whereas before I was only passively checking the score during commercial breaks.

As I said elsewhere in this thread, people who worry about that don't really understand the true value of stars in the NBA. If you take a group of 5 NBA guys whose mean would basically be that of an average player (as opposed to a bunch of non-scorers or whatever) then that team can hang with the rest of the league simply by executing and not making mistakes. The teams that get blown out are the ones full of upside guys who are prone to boneheaded mistakes. People forget that somebody needs to take the shots that the Tim Duncans of the world aren't taking when they sit and that just because you don't get those shots in normal play situations doesn't mean you can't make them. It only means that Tim Duncan is better at it than you and deserves those shots as a result. So when these disciplined players do get such opportunities the outcome is predictable: solid scoring that the elite player probably could have improved upon. It's really made clear in the fourth quarter when those elite guys can make the higher level shot creation plays that your average guy can't handle on a daily basis. But to say that a team of disciplined but more or less average skillwise players couldn't hang with a top tier team is silly. If Lebron is out of the game it doesn't mean his points don't exist, it means the points that usually come from him will probably come less efficiently that night. The Spurs like role players who do their job and don't screw up too often so it makes sense that the game played out like it did.

I think part of the problem in regard to this perception is that the NBA is the only level where this is especially true and you have a lot of players who meet a minimum threshold of quality with a guaranteed limit on who will have a chance to play. College level and below are diluted enough that the difference between a top player and an average player really can come down to some players having the athleticism and talent to compete at the highest level while others simply wouldn't cut it on a top tier team no matter their work ethic or desire. If you have proven yourself good enough to be a solid NBA rotation player you simply can't be THAT far below the best players even if they are clearly better than you. They are at a level you will never reach but they can never climb high enough to make the gap comparable to those of college ball and lower.

Last season I went to a Spurs-Blazers game and Pop didn't play Ginobili, Parker or Duncan. Blazers destroyed them at the Rose Garden (Chalupas in the 3rd quarter). Needless to say I was a little disappointed to not see them play but I respect Pops right to do what is best for his team.

This a really tough situation to pick sides. From a television ratings point of view, fuck David Stern. But I feel for spectators who actually paid for the tickets to watch the game, hoping to see the big three's up against each other. I know it was a good game regardless but having to pay higher ticket prices to watch a game where the superstars are resting would piss me off as well.

Coach Pop is the best in the game, and definitely knew what he was doing. His players are old, and they have a big game coming up against the conference leading Grizzleys. The Spurs have also played something like 6 games in 9 days, mainly road. Spo made the right call for his team, and didn't care about what ratings the NBA was getting that night (as he shouldn't... he's a coach, not a PR consultant).

BUT, can we all jump off the "fuck stern" high horse and just attempt to see things from Stern's point of view?

The NBA is a business, first and foremost. Think if you were a fan who paid good money for a prime-time match-up against the championship Heat and the Spurs (who finished 2nd in the Western playoffs last year), only to be disappointed. REGARDLESS OF HOW THE GAME WENT DOWN, almost all assumed the game to be a blowout, leaving people upset who paid the money for it. The NBA schedules games like this on Thursdays because they know TNT will want the good match-ups that they can hype up and do what businesses are supposed to do, make money.

Would it be okay for teams to rest their starters for the Christmas Day matchups? NO. Would it be okay for a team to rest their starters for an ABC Sunday afternoon game? NO. Why? Because those are the NBA's "Sunday Night Football" matchups. The big daddys that are only scheduled when they're schedule so TNT can broadcast them nationally.

Is a November TNT game anywhere near comparable to the important games I just mentioned? Not really, but Stern is standing up for his business partners, and I commend him for that. Should Pop be punished for doing what is best for his team? Definitely not, but Stern raises a good point as to the fine line that separates the business side of things as opposed to the long-term success of a team.